Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_mellior | Hacker News Reader

... a large part of which was just responses to one person who said "OMG, you can't write a kernel in Haskell, it uses malloc", as if (a) Linux didn't have its own kmalloc, and (b) a hypothetical Rust kernel wouldn't use malloc.

View on HN

In the event that anyone isn't clear on the relative quality of discussions across various websites, please click the reddit link and observe someone asking a sincere question and getting specific and helpful responses, with no attempt to score points by misrepresenting the position of the others.

Inspired by that response, I shared a Haskell OS and Ocaml on PIC microcontrollers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6h5mht/system_program...

Not a wasted question after all given prior, positive feedback on those projects.

That is a very good question for someone new to the field and the answer is really well detailed. Honestly, as of right now the discussion there is more enlightening than here.

I agree that in a thread about Rust systems programming, asking how Rust (and, come to think of it, Haskell) can do dynamic allocation on the bare metal is a good question. I think the good underlying question was devalued by what I think was the poster's lack of reflection. Obviously Rust can do it because Rust is magical, but Haskell? How would that ever work?

Your interpretation may vary.

With the added context your original comment makes more sense to me.

Also, now this thread is better than the one over on Reddit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com